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Is Second Life the Paris Hilton of Virtual Worlds?
An anonymous reader writes "Second Life appears to be suffering a bit of a backlash from its PR efforts. Matt Mihaly over at The Forge, newly-returned muckracker Peter Ludlow at the Second Life Herald and Tony Walsh at Clickable Culture have all recently taken Linden Labs to task for their non-stop, arguably deceitful, PR machine and frequent downtime. Further, over on Terranova a veritable cornucopia of long-time, experienced virtual world developers, including Raph Koster, Mike Sellers, Randy Farmer, the aforementioned Matt Mihaly, and Daniel James, have piled on, calling into question the fundamental utility of Second Life.
Does Second Life have real utility, or is it simply an endless exercise in unsubstantiated public relations? What do Slashdot readers think?"
Does Second Life have real utility, or is it simply an endless exercise in unsubstantiated public relations?
Yes
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
Do you want my opinion or my second life's?
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
... before you can have a second one?
Seriously, three second-life articles a day is a bit much, isn't it? Isn't it time to fork off secondlife.slashdot.org and leave the games section to deal with, you know, actual games.
Software patents delenda est.
The Spoiled Whore 3D Playset. Actually, I wouldn't say it's like Paris Hilton really, more like P.T. Barnum or that guy who sold deeds to land on the moon. You pay money for something that has no real actual worth.
Does Second Life have real utility
If by "utility" you mean does it provide enough enterainment to warrant thousands of people paying a monthly fee to engage in it, then the answer would be yes. If by utility you mean, "does it serve a bigger good", then I'd say, how many of the other MMORPG serve any more utility than what I first mentioned?
unlike the real Paris Hilton, you cannot get an STD from second life....
Monstar L
i really don't get the point right now. it's too early
the idea obviously is to spark a virtual world extension of reality, a common ground for people to engage in social exchange in groups
but what it requires to do this is wide adaptation, for a lot of people to think "second life" when it comes to doing these things online in social groups
and thus the pr machine: they are chasing that goal
it's the network problem: the telephone network is only important if there are a lot of telephones attached to it. q: how important is second life? a: how many people are using it?
so we shall see if second life reaches that critical mass, that spark, to become what it already pretends it is in its pr... or if some other online universe becomes that de facto standard of social group exchange online... or if the real world doesn't need a second life
because a lot of really cool ideas never pan out just because people don't find utility for them. second life could be such a high minded stab in the dark that goes nowhere. or i could be wrong and it will be bigger than google. who knows? i don't know, and i don't pretend to... but don't let second life pr tell you they do know, they don't know either
another avenue is that second life will try a few other things besides its much vaunted currency exchange. if it keeps fumbling around with a few ideas, it may suddenly hit that spark, and be something big, something big that was not what it was intended for, but something big nonetheless, if second life allows some experimentation with its reason for being
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You mean, Paris Hilton is for real? Nah, I don't believe it. On any real human with a head that empty, the skull would simply implode from the 1 atm pressure.
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
Is Second Life the Paris Hilton of Virtual Worlds?
I dunno, how easy is Second Life?
(The summary already states that it's ubiquitous, apparently useless and is subject to frequent downtime...)
As a fairly well-known Second Lifer, I think it's got plenty of good applications. The most obvious is clearly entertainment: the ability to attend live music acts several times a week now that I'm in my married 30s instead of my single 20s has a huge appeal to me. My real-life company also uses it to train our field technicians on the under-the-asphault workings of gas stations. For some reason, the community has a really cool feel to it, and I've made quite a few friends who have transitioned to become real-life friends, and mingle with my real life friend crowd. I don't understand the haters at Slashdot: I'm not a gamer, never have been, and Second Life is the only 3-D application I really use these days. Second Life is not a game, it's a far more complex application and network (everything is streamed), so comparisons to MMOGs that store 99% of the content on the hard drive and have professional content creators really isn't fair.
I never got a good feeling of community at Active Worlds, which Second Life has in spades. There's a huge academic community within Second Life as well who seem fairly convinced that the educational possibilities of Second Life are immense. When I first joined Second Life after reading about content creators retaining IP rights to their creations on Slashdot in 2003, I thought I'd check it out for the free one-week trial. Here I am three years later, running real-life conventions for Second Life enthusiasts with keynote speakers like Mitch Kapor! Try it, it might surprise you.
You know, the thing about Second Life is that it has so much potential. It really does. Unless you've been in there, you're the creative sort and you've experienced the way it can allow you to build, share and interact with people online you'll have a hard time understanding what the big deal is. It's a wonderful toy and an interesting social construct. Do I believe that Second Life is really anything more than a toy? No, not really. It's fun to play around in for a while. For some people, it becomes quite literally a second life (I know it did for me) with social obligations, friends, events, and planned projects. Hell, I know how absorbing it can be and how detailed you can get, I (as Alan Beckett) won the 2005 Game Development contest with Jeffrey Gomez. That was where I really began to lose faith in Second Life for a variety of reasons. The technical limitations on Second Life are pretty nasty in some regards. Scripting can only go so far when your engine is struggling with the load of the basic client. Jeff had to work up a lot of work arounds in his script, created a lovely simple collision detection system, whipped up a random terrain generator, and allow for multiple users to participate on the same level at the same time. This is no small achievement within Second Life and what we built was most definately a game different and unique in and of itself. It was never perfect, though. We had to keep things as low "primcount" as possible (Prims are basic geometric shapes that make up all models. You build with them in Second Life.) to keep the game from choking outright, were constantly juggling what the sim itself could handle with what we wanted, and when all was said and done they released a patch that outright killed the game. Jeff just could not make it work again, the Lindens (those who act as administrative staff withing Second Life) talked of helping and never did and we had to badger them repeatedly before we ever even saw the promised reward money for the contest. Their staff are, in general, useless, unhelpful and irritating to deal with. Ask most long-time residents involved in the creative side of things and you'll generally find that the story is the same for any big project, assuming it ever even gets as far as completion. Second Life is a wonderful idea, but the client is aging, the staff are not helping, and the direction it's taking is an act of desperation to keep the whole raft afloat. I haven't logged on but once or twice in the past several months and haven't really felt the desire to, either. When someone creates a better alternative I'll move over there in a heartbeat, but for now, it's the best option we've got.
These objections seem to rest on three claims:
1) Second Life has over-stated its number of active users by counting every registered account as an active user.
2) Second Life suffers from reliability problems.
3) "... there is no actual utility in Second Life for anyone who isn't there for the sake of feeling as if they're on some sort of cutting edge (or who are among the 10 people or so who manage to make some decent money via the virtual world by selling custom dildos and virtual prostitution services." (Emphasis added.)
As for the first claim, big deal. So there are roughly a million "registered users" and roughly 10,000 users online at any given time. That's a difference of a hundred-fold. But it's not worth getting worked up about; it's just a standard PR tactic. See also: hard drive manufacturers whose advertised hard drive capacities are slightly higher than the actual capacity of the drive, due to counting a "Gigabyte" as 1,000 MB instead of 1,024 MB.
For the second, outages are pretty common in most services. This, too, is pretty much par for the course. Nothing to get worked up about.
The third objection is the most interesting, since the blogger seems to think that "actual utility" means "everybody makes money." Which is just silly. Second Life was never intended to make money for anyone but 1) the company, and 2) a small number of exceptionally diligent users, maybe, if they're lucky. Most of the users -- particularly the active ones -- seem to be more interested in using Second Life for social activities (e.g. chat), and building their own dream-environments, lovingly decked out with elaborate houses, swimming pools, trees, etc. That's a "utility" that has nothing to do with making money for yourself.
If the Rah Rah Second Life rhetoric irritates the blogger, there's a simple solution: stop reading it.
The whole reason for the existence of both is social networking. Making money is clearly a big deal for some SL users, but without other users to actually buy their virtual goods or rent space to build upon, the creators/sellers wouldn't have a market.
Personally, having been in SL off and on for over a year, I think it's a product with limited shelf-life. The developers have been promising big things, like better physics, rendering and interface tools for next to forever, but between community resistance to change and their own middling competencies (not to mention popular interactive items that depend on bugs and bad scripting to function), their efforts have dwindled to very basic bug-fixing and quality of life tweaks, while doggedly chasing after investment capital. Major changes risk forcing the users to re-learn or rebuild their projects, but at the same time other outfits are developing similar applications that leave SL in the virtual dust.
No matter how many times I've checked out SL it leaves the same impression: crap
Considering how powerful video cards and PCs have become it's unforgivable for a product like this to have such ugly graphics and such poor performance. The flexibility is really interesting but to what end? People blundering with choppy video about in an empty looking 3d world with as much visual depth as a Mario game?
Second Life is a test bed, that's it. It is far too crappy to be significant.
Second life (to me at least) just seems like another MUD/MUCK, only with a lot less creativity. Almost all the icons are made by a small group of people and you have to buy one (because most of us don't have that much artistic talent to make something that looks good), a lot of the actions you do are programs that you or someone else probably bought (because too many people don't want to learn another language, or programming).
I've watched people play with Second Life, and I see them always clicking on lots of actions, and clicking on lots of poses, etc etc etc. It seems to me that a large percentage of interaction and behavior in Second Life is made up of canned actions and behaviors. Which is to say: not very creative. Yes you have a pretty interface and we all know how a lot of people can't resist pretty pictures on a screen, but content-wise I think it tends to be pretty vapid.
Except of course for the people who make a lot of money off of it, (and I know more than one bringing home several hundred dollars of real cash per month from sales to the other users). To them I'm sure it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, and I guess from their point of view they're right. But I just don't find it to be very interesting or entertaining.
Yeah I have to vote for "unsubstantiated public relations".
Whenever I read any of the SL articles, I always have to wonder, have any of these people actually played the game?
Here is my experience from having tried it a few times:
1) I log in, there's a ton of people sitting around in crazy costumes chatting. Lots of typing sound effects. So far so good.
2) I try to find something cool. It took me a while before I figured out how to use the map, or bring up the list of popular destinations, but I can get that far now. By the way, the GUI moves like molasses. It's painful to use.
3) I warp in to a new area. At first I don't see anything but terrain. Gradually, distant shapes begin to stream in. I try to fly around as things are streaming in, but I keep hitting invisible walls. It takes about a minute of streaming before I can actually see the walls I'm running in to.
4) After about 2 minutes of waiting, the area finishes streaming in. 99% of the time, it's a store. And 90% of the time, it's specifically a clothing store, either selling a) clever t-shirts, or b) sexy female models.
5) Repeat at step 2
SL is great in concept, but right now the execution of that concept just isn't there. And I can forgive some stuff. I can forgive the fact that most of the user-created content is crap. But I can't get past the horribly slow GUI, and the horribly slow streaming of new content. They are show-stoppers for me.
& I wish I knew the password to your heart . . . &
I've never seen Second Life's bush.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
in that TerraNova thread, but rather on the whole thought of the 3d Web. In fact, that's what most of the discussion was about, not SL in specific.
-Raph
Unlike every other online service I'm aware of, Second Life exists only to...exist. The players determine what they do with it, and so without a built-in "purpose" per se, Second Life will live or die by things like Public Relations efforts.
I have to imagine that other online services must be a bit jealous, however; I mean, with WoW, you couldn't really make a press release out of activities in the game in the way you can with Second Life, because (using a recent example) companies aren't going to host a press conference in WoW. The fantasy aspects (and just plain game aspects) of WoW and others prevent it from being taken seriously as anything other than a game (and perhaps an economics experiment.)
So boo on the haters; let 'em talk about themselves all they want. Heh.
So, the first time I ever logged into WoW, I ran around a lot, and tried to figure out what to do. After a while, I stumbled into various NPCs that gave me quests to fulfill, and in attempting to do so figured out how the weaponry and such worked.
Now, the first time I ever logged into Second Life, I ran around a lot, and tried to figure out what to do. After a while, I stumbled across various people (not NPCs) learning how to script, or testing something, or playing with things other people had scripted. This made me want to do the same thing.
The thing is, you'll like WoW and such if you are bored and need something to do; you'll like Second Life if you have something you want to do and need a virtual world in which to do it.
Im currently working as Art Director/Builder on what from my knowledge is the most ambitious project on the Second Life platform to date. I have always been a huge skeptic when it comes to much of the hype about SL. It is just beginning to show signs of being what it promotes itself as.
Decentralized education and social networking are its two main potentials right now so far as sustainable business models are concerned. The platform is still clunkier than serious investors in its uses would prefer, but it continues to evolve. It is too early to say with any degree of certainty that it will or won't achieve its promise. There is no question however to those that are involved in pushing Second Life's application, that a virtual platform like Second Life will have a multitude of uses in education, simulation and social networking. Yes it is early for it, but I think SL is hanging on and pushing the concept to the masses to attempt to spur the development along. I have worried recently that Linden Lab risk expanding their user base to a level they can't handle serving, but I'd rather have too much business than not enough so long as it doesnt ruin the future prospects with bad impressions.
And so much of the press from Linden Lab, including the 3 articles a day posted on Slashdot, ignore one use of Second Life that is extremely profitable (as many businesses in SL are, Bubble 2.0 or not). SEX. Virtual sex may be the holy grail of pornography. Second Life is already a platform for it and projects for networked sexual I/O hardware devices are already in the working model stage.
So really, just like the early World Wide Web: Second Life is clunky but shows signs of real promise. It's rife with overinflated business hype. And it always has sex to keep it afloat.
As far as the comparison to Paris Hilton: no Second Life is not the slutty ho-bag of MMORPGs. Wait! maybe it is . . . *logs into SL*
It's so cheap as to be free (I got a perma-account back when they were giving them away, dunno if they still do that)
It frequently doesn't work.
It's pretty farking ugly.
Constantly going down on just about everyone.
Meaningless, worthless except to narcissists.
Frequently seen in odd sexual practices.
No visible means of support; somehow able to make money despite not actually DOING anything, and doing that poorly, if you can believe it.
Doesn't like guys who play World War 2 Online.
I'd say that's a pretty solid YES.
-Styopa
I think the Paris Hilton analogy fits more with the current residents than with the game world itself... And yeah, the residents that I've seen have mainly been what PR has shown me. So that's probably not an accurate stereotype (ha!) for all SL players.
Second Life is an environment whose main purpose is social. It gives people a place to express their artistic creativity, and take advantage of freedoms that they can't find in their real lives. They take the concept of player created content to a whole new level, and that's impressive. Not only do they give the player the freedom to make what they want, they also provide incentive to, in the fact that they have IP rights over their creations and can sell them to other players.
I read somewhere that SL was inspired largely by Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. There, I can't fault them either. There are few books that would be better inspiration for an online world. There's still a wide gap though, both technological and societal, between Stephenson's concept and Second Life. The immersiveness is not quite there for me yet. I see it more as a hip hangout place for... those who fit nicely (and willingly) into stereotypical groups... to meet. I.E. MySpace 3D.
In addition to showing us a grand picture of the future of society, Stephenson also showed us many of the problems associated with such a world. This world too has its own share of misery. The very fact that we have to escape to another world to feel free... That says something. Those who try to escape from their problems are doomed to drag them along. And even as people escape to this new frontier, the corporations will follow them. We've already seen a couple big companies jump on the SL boat.
While in many ways this is new, it's also following a pattern. The pattern of any major frontier. Right now it's in the Wild West stage... once big businesses move in they're going to pull legistation with them, and it's going to get mucked down in beaurocratic non-sense.
So I'm waiting. I'm curious to see how this all works out, but I really don't see any personal advantage for me in joining SL right now. More time/effort/money dedication than an MMO, and essentially the same social exposure... No thanks guys, I'll pass. Good luck, I'll be keeping an eye out, but it's not for me right now.
That's hot.
*ducks*
Scott Swezey
I suppose that's one way of looking at it.
People use SL for primarily three things now.
The first is socializing. People love logging into SL and chatting in a 3d environment. Why? It's expressive. Why do Slashdot users hang around in programming IRC rooms, or post on Slashdot? Community. Participation. Chatting. Whatever. SL users do that all the time. Except now they can have a visual interpretation to their words; humans are a visual creature, after all.
The second is creativity. I've run into so many creative people using SL as a creative release (myself included). If you have a creative drive of any sort, SL is a huge sink of that. Houses, motorcycles, characters, machinima, whatever.
The third, becoming more prevalent now, is moneymaking. People make money in SL in two ways: producing compelling content (avatars, clothing) and selling a boatload of it, or by doing promotional work for companies wanting to get their foot in the door (companies like Millions of Us and the Electric Sheep Company do this). The former is less lucrative than the latter, currently, but is also less likely to be affected by the obvious bubble this is causing.
In short, SL is what you make of it. Sex house? Sure. Creative playground? Yep. Marketing gimmick? You bet.
So's real life.
hookers and grits.
1) Free is good; isn't slashdot all about the open source movement, blah blah blah?
2) Working for me right now.
3) Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And, the world is made by amateurs, not professionals. Sturgeon's Law.
4) If people stopped grey-gooing the grid, this wouldn't be an issue.
5) All games and chatrooms are meaningless.
6) Because Lord knows, there aren't any deviant sexual people in real life...
7) The act of creating isn't doing anything? Awesome, I'll be sure to send that memo over to Da Vinci.
8) Because the contingent there were racist homophobes who shot their neighbors?
Sheesh.
hookers and grits.
>> it's too early
It's not too early to understand Second Life's implementation and to call it a disaster, because that is not changing. And it won't change. We've explained the problem to them repeatedly, to no avail.
I've been on Second Life a couple of years, and I still am, because the concept of Second Life is fantastic and I would love to see them succeed. But it won't, it can't possibly, because it's designed like a toy instead of for growth.
The problem is simple: SL's servers are mapped physically and logically into a static grid, where each server implements a fixed number of zones (called "sims"), usually just 1. This server does all the processing for everything in that zone (excluding database), and that includes all objects, all land-related storage, all scripting, and all handling of people in that zone.
Now early on in SL's life, some incompetent designer convinced the CEO that this is scalable, simply because you can extend the grid north-south and east-west as much as you like. Unfortunately, he or she failed to see that this is only scalable as long as all people and all objects stay in their home zones. Needless to say, that kills any prospects the world may have had stone dead. No crowds, no major sporting events, no well-populated pop concerts, no nothing beyond nightclub size, because 1 machine per zone (no matter how powerful) simply cannot scale that way.
Replacing each sim server by a cluster can't help, because SL zones can't be processed in a distributed manner. Huge multi-core SMP machines operating on a single server image might work, but then their entire business model of "one cheap machine per zone" would break down. And they can't put just a few big-iron machines in and restrict the large events to those zones, because anyone can hold an event on their own land, and that would discriminate between zones.
Another way of explaining the problem: processing people takes up most of a zone server's CPU in Second Life, but when people move from their home zone to another, the CPU power of their home zone does not follow them. So the server at an event is massively oversubscribed, while the one at home is now idle. It's inherently non-scalable for events and for objects that move between zones.
I've told their CEO and lots of other people there about this many times (and given them dynamically scalable solutions too), but it's bad news so the message is accepted politely and then ignored.
And yes, it *is* very bad news, because not only does it mean that Second Life has no future as it stands, it also means that there will be a revolution should they try to retrofix it. Because you see their business model is based on people paying for computing resources, and the economics of a dynamically allocated design are radically different. 400K+ landlords will suddenly find that their "investment" is now worthless, because land acreage is merely inactive storage in a dynamic architecture, and will cost almost nothing.
Which is almost certainly why Linden Labs haven't bitten the bullet and replaced their static design. It will be too painful. And now it may be too late.
Still, I wish them luck. The concept of Second Life has huge potential. It was just let down by a system architect who didn't understand scalability in a living virtual world, where people actually leave home and want to gather in events.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Frankly, I think the guys at Southpark had the right of it on Paris Hilton. Still, you have to hand it to her. She's turned being a jobless, skill-less, looser into a paycheck. And a nice hefty pay check at that... which means she's probably not as dumb as you think.
2 cents,
QueenB.
HDGary secures my bank
Actually, it's nothing like the World Wide Web, because it's proprietary and centralized.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
SL jumped the shark when they stifled the community by shutting down their forums. They're interested in high-profile advertising, not listening to their users.
So I went to register: first they want an email address; then they want the marketing data; then they want your credit card number. Not that they're ever going to charge it, you understand. They just want to hold it on their database where it gives them a warm and cozy feeling.
It's classic sleazeball technique. Get as much resalable data from the mark as possible, starting with the least intrusive, and working up to something that could actually be used to defraud. I don't trust them, based purely on their methodology.
Needless to say, I didn't sign up. The next great step forward in computer aided interactions can happen without me, thank you very much.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
I don't want to interact with these asses in real life why the hell would I want to spend my time socializing with them in some "second life"? Seriously. If you are that much of a social butterfly you go out to shows, bars and dance. You meet people, you see what they actually look like and you have stories to tell people. You do something active. The idea of sitting around with some fake ass avatar pretending to be social while you get even fatter and more boring is absurd. There are a lot better things to waste your time with then some mindless interaction with other ugly anti-socialites. Yeah.... it's a lot like myspace.
I know your response was as tongue-in-cheek as mine was meant to be, but the last couple of notes had enough 'hint of bitterness' that they're worth responding to:
t ml or http://secondlife.com/notes/2003_07_07_archive.php #20030707) because the hippies objected to the pro-war postings and tried to cover them.
7) The act of creating isn't doing anything? Awesome, I'll be sure to send that memo over to Da Vinci.
Relativism, ahoy!
I'm not sure the it logically follows that "since DaVinci created masterpieces, that all acts of creation are therefore valuable"?
8) Because the contingent there were racist homophobes who shot their neighbors?
Funny, I thought it was because the inhabitants of Jesse were hypocrites that believed in the freedoms of speech and thought only when it agreed with their utopian religion (not to be confused with actual religion, with, like, God and stuff). If I recall correctly, the "Jesse War" BEGAN with the suppression of the WW2OLer's FREEDOM OF SPEECH (viz http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,59675,00.h
It was absolutely hilarious to us (by now you've probably realized I'm one of "them") that the hippies didn't understand the real ramifications of being in Jesse....ie that the rules of the area allowed a Hobbesian resolution to the conflict. The only reason 'we' effectively lost was because Linden Labs broke their OWN rules and intervened like a Politically-correct Deus ex Machina. That was probably very validating for the hippies, we imagined, because it dovetailed so nicely with their general pro-nanny-state politics (again, ONLY as long as it agrees with their Leftish beliefs). So the WW2OLers lost in actuality, but IMVHO won a giant moral victory.
-Styopa
With credentials like yours, how could they have ignored your advice?